October 2020 Dispatch

[Kyell Gold]

September Recap

I spent a lot of this month writing the mystery/thriller I teased last month. I also took on a couple other projects (one was reading the book in the Spotlight this month and the other I can’t talk about yet) that have been keeping me busyish. I’ve signed a contract for the Dude, Where’s My Pack? art and expect that this coming month I’ll be doing final edits on it. But other than that it hasn’t been a very exciting month.

My Zootopia fanfiction writing streams have gone pretty well! I’ve been doing them Tuesdays around noon PDT for 60-90 minutes, and intend to continue them into September. Keep an eye on my Twitter or follow me on picarto.tv (https://picarto.tv/KyellGold) to be notified next time I stream.

Streaming shows: We’re watching the second season of The Boys and I like it more than I expected. The first season was overly gory and this one is too, but the characters feel more settled and the writers are starting to do some interesting things. I still feel like the main villain character is under-complex—they keeping moving them around from one obsession to another but it never advances their character or even indicates that they have any kind of arc. But they are succeeding in making me want him to die, so there’s that.

MaoMao continues to be delightful fun. Legend of Korra is neat but different from Avatar and it took a while to get used to. It came alive in the second season when we went back into the past to explore the spirit world, for me. We’re not done with it yet so I’ll hold off on more thoughts until then.

I’m watching Dead To Me, a comedy (sort of) starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s not a joke-joke comedy, but rather a light drama maybe? There are lots of humorous parts but it centers around two women building a friendship after losing partners, so dealing with grief is part of it. It’s more than just a buddy comedy against a tragic backdrop, though; it’s part mystery/thriller and part soap opera and the characters are great. I’m almost through the second season, which is all there is so far. Highly recommend it.

Release dates 

Love Match (2013-2015) is out! This series has been a ton of fun to work on and I’m really proud of how it came out. E-book is on baddogbooks.com in both ePub and Kindle formats and will be on other retail outlets probably in October.

 

The fourth and final Calatians book, The Revolution and the Fox, will come out January 15, 2021 so that we can try to get some reviews up for it. It’s currently being serialized on my OTHER Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/timsusman).

Audiobooks: If you don’t have an Audible account yet, check out my new Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/user-710305036-429996600), which has samples and links to all my audiobooks. Those links help me get extra money especially if you use them to sign up for a new account. Savrin has been slowed by the pandemic (having everyone home always leaves less time for recording), but once Love Match 1 is up, we hope to get Titles and Ty Game out as well! Still hoping to get the DWMF audiobook up soon! 

My FREE book of writing advice called Do You Need Help? is on baddogbooks.com right here: https://baddogbooks.com/product/do-you-need-help/

 

Appearances in 2020

My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).

Megaplex has been postponed, but I have been told that they would like to keep the same GOH slate into 2021. I don’t have any other plans to attend furry conventions in person until then.

 

Spotlight and Excerpt: Collaborators, by Deborah Ross.

I met Deborah through a group of queer science fiction writers, and recently she reached out to offer advance copies of a novel she’s going to re-release in October, a book called Collaborators. The book details human first contact with an alien race (described as looking like anthro cheetahs with crests, though I don’t believe they have tails) whose concepts of gender differ from ours. There are parallels to The Left Hand of Darkness, obviously; I don’t know that you could explore gender constructs in an alien race and not evoke that book. But Collaborators makes that only one piece in a larger story. The arrival of Terrans on an alien planet stokes existing political stress, and the more the Terrans try to help, the worse things get. But Terrans are not by any means the selfless heroes of this political story: they are misled by their technological superiority into assuming that they are superior in every way, and they make their share of arrogant and cruel mistakes. The story of their complicity in the formation of an authoritarian government, and the resistance that rises against it, feel even more relevant today than when the book was written almost thirty years ago.

What really shines in Collaborators is the world-building. The Bandari are that familiar humanish kind of alien, similar enough in many ways for the differences to be either thrown into relief or overlooked. They farm the land, bake and cook food, ferment wine, gather in cities, and worship an octopartite god. But they also share emotions more thoroughly than humans do, which can be good or bad, and they do not recognize gender differences except specifically around the act of mating (technically they are hermaphroditic and either of a pair can carry the child). Their customs and world reflect these differences, and we are introduced to them slowly and naturally through the characters of the story.

The characters also shine in this book. There are a lot of them to follow, but each of the main characters turns out to have a compelling arc and a satisfying resolution—no mean feat in a long book like this one.

I offered Deborah the chance to add to this newsletter in lieu of hosting a blog post (I haven’t posted there in ages and I suspect more people will see it here), so here is what she chose to write:

Power, Gender, and Sexuality in Collaborators

Collaborators is an occupation-and-resistance novel set on a far-distant planet. The action pits the crew of a Terran spaceship, with all their scientific superiority, against the native race, at a much lower technology level. Very early in the writing process, I realized that in order to talk about the uses and abuses of power, I had to address the issue of gender. I wanted to create a resonance between the tensions arising from First Contact and those arising from gender expectations. What if the native race did not divide themselves into genders? How would that work – biologically? romantically? socially? politically? How would it affect the division of labor? child-rearing? How many ways would Terrans misinterpret a race for whom every other age-appropriate person is a potential lover? Or, in a life-paired couple, each partner equally likely to engender or gestate a child?

For my alien race in Collaborators, I also wanted sexuality to be important. I decided that young adults would be androgynous in appearance and highly sexual. Sex would be something they’d enjoy often and enthusiastically with their age-mates. However, the intense intimacy created by sex exclusively with the same person would lead to a cascade of emotional and physiological effects resulting in a permanent, lifelong pairing. The pairing, a biological bond obvious to everyone around the couple, would lead to polarization with accompanying mood swings, aggression, inability to focus. Each partner would appear more “female” or “male,” which would inevitably set up occasions for misunderstanding with Terrans, who think and react in terms of those divisions. The natives, on the other hand, would wonder how people who are permanently polarized can get any work done, and react to Terran women as if they were all pregnant, and therefore to be protected at all costs because their own birth rate is low.

Just as we’ve instituted the canonical Talk about the birds and the bees, or sex ed in schools, so the natives would have traditions of preparing their young people, trying to ensure that pairing does not have disastrous political or inter-clan consequences. We know how badly that works in humans, so it’s likely to be equally ineffective with native teenagers, too.

 

Here’s an excerpt from a scene early in the book:

Alon had stayed up far too late last night, dancing and then lovemaking with Birre. Now he slept on as Birre cracked the door open and reached up to muffle the chain of porcelain bells. Birre slipped inside, past the portfolios of antique botanical prints, round-bellied clay stove, and corner desk. His eyes glinted mischievously as he bent over Alon.

Alon’s head lolled against the back of the chair, one arm dangling, loose-jointed as a child. A patch of sunlight glowed on his face and highlighted the soft fur, turning it to russet over skin so pale and thin, the veins showed as a threadwork of darker blue. His flat, unformed breasts barely disturbed the folds of his tunic.

Suddenly Alon startled awake, heart pounding. His feet kicked out and the hair along his crest stiffened. His hands flailed empty space and then, unexpectedly, closed around Birre’s shoulders.

Alon’s vision leapt into focus. For a long, terrifying instant, Birre’s face seemed utterly unfamiliar to him, as if he’d never seen it before. Yet at the same time, he seemed to be looking into a mirror. They were of an age, although Birre was taller and more slender, his crest almost burnt-colored. Yet in a heart-stopping moment, those round black eyes, so unexpectedly serious, seemed to see right through Alon to the very depths of his soul.

Alon trembled. Everywhere Birre’s body touched his—hands, knee against thigh, the almost imperceptible movement of breath over hair—he trembled. But not with the shivering spasms of lust. Lust he knew well enough, a night’s mutual pleasuring. This new emotion swept away everything that had come before. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Birre took a step backward, a graceless stumble. The folds of his tunic slipped through Alon’s fingers.

Despite all the lingering confusion of his awakening, Alon knew in that moment that this was what he wanted for the rest of his life—to be turning, ever turning, toward Birre’s sun.

Birre stood, shoulders hunched slightly, hands hugging his arms, eyes fastened on a display of children’s picture books. His nostrils flared and the hairs along his neck lifted slightly. He stood so still he didn’t seem to be breathing. Noises drifted in from the street outside, people laughing, the clatter of boot heels on stone, and a creaking, hand-pushed cart.

Alon moved to stand behind Birre, aching to take him into his arms. He had been warned—they all had, at school, by their parents—of the dangers of such a moment. How instinctive drives could take over, overruling sense, judgment, even personal taste. Of the disasters of a pairing without intelligent choice. In times past, before Carrel-az-Ondre, the First Helm, such a union could have serious political consequences between feuding clans.

Birre’s head dipped and the movement, almost timid, so unlike him, sent a rush of tenderness through Alon.

“Alon, I’m scared.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t...expect it so soon.”

“Or with me?”

“Oh no, don’t think I wouldn’t want you.” Birre’s voice roughened with emotion. “Never think that!”

The next moment—Alon could never tell how it happened—Birre’s arms were around him, hard and tight, and his heart felt as if it would explode. His breath stuttered through his throat in a half-sob. He couldn’t make out Birre’s murmured words and he didn’t care.

Some time later Birre drew back, pushed Alon to arm’s-length, and looked at him frankly, without any trace of shyness. His fingers gripped Alon’s arms. “Did you have any idea this was going to happen?”

Irrational joy surged through Alon. When he found his voice, he said, “Oh yes, I stayed up all night planning it.”

The familiar twinkle returned to Birre’s eyes. “I know what you stayed up all night doing.” He slipped his arm around Alon’s shoulders. “We should let them know.” Meaning, of course, his own family. They were an aristocratic sept of one of the eight ruling clans.

Alon thought that all his own parents had to do was look at him and they would know. They might even guess it was Birre because for the past year it had been Birre-this and Birre-that. It would come as no surprise, either. He and Birre were undoubtedly the last to realize what was going on.

 

If you’re intrigued, you can get Collaborators here:

Order/Preorder Links

Amazon (ebook and trade paperback) https://www.amazon.com/Collaborators-Deborah-J-Ross-ebook/dp/B08747XP15/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=deborah+j+ross+collaborators&qid=1597367139&sr=8-1

B & N (ebook, trade paperback, and hardcover/laminated cover) https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/collaborators-deborah-j-ross/1136878756?ean=9781538013151

Kobo   https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/collaborators-10

 

 

Questions From YOU

 

If you’ve got a question about my books or my writing—or anything else you want me to talk about—shoot me an email and I’ll answer it here.

 

This month’s question comes from Scribbles (@VinnieWriter) who asks: “Have you done any pleasure reading since the pandemic started? What is your go-to snack when you are writing?”

 

I have recently gotten back to pleasure reading because David Mitchell put out a new book, and while his books are not part of a series, they are all kind of interconnected, so characters from other ones show up often enough that it’s nice to have a refresher on them, so before I read the new book, I read his last full novel, The Bone Clocks, which I’d been wanting to do anyway because I remembered really liking it but the details were fading. It was, yes, great. I went on to the new one, Utopia Avenue, and finished that one just last week. It’s about an eclectic band that forms in the UK in the mid-1960s and how they experience the world in general, and of music in particular, in that time. There is some strong crossover with The Bone Clocks and also with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, so I might have to go back and re-read that one as well.

Anyway, Utopia Avenue is about how we communicate our lives to other people, and how those communications are received (among other themes, but featuring three songwriters means that that theme gets the most attention). There are lovely prose passages, and many narrative tricks that are fun to experience and interesting to think about. I loved this book, and as a bonus it might be his most accessible book since Black Swan Green (for people who have difficulty with the jumping around of Cloud Atlas or Bone Clocks, or the denser world of Thousand Autumns) in that it is a relatively sequential story that stays mostly grounded in the real world, with a little diversion into fantasy, though not as sharp as his last few books.

An overarching theme through the last three books (four counting Slade House, his horror novella) is a conflict between Horologers, people whose souls are reborn into a new body when they die, keeping all their memories, and various groups of people who have figured out ways to prolong their lives by predating on humans, usually psycho-sensitive humans. Bone Clocks brings this conflict to the forefront more than any other, but rarely are the protagonists of the books actually protagonists of the conflict; usually the books center around ordinary people who get caught up in the struggle. It is a neat dollop of fantasy in some lovely books about the world. (If you want David Mitchell’s books, you can easily find them on any platform.)

My next read is going to be a book I Kickstartered: Naiya and the Foxdragon, by Naomi Vandoren. I saw Naomi’s art at a WorldCon and thought it was beautiful, so when I found out she was writing and illustrating a novel, I didn’t hesitate to support it. The book looks fantastic and I am very excited to get started on it. Find out more here if you’re interested: https://foxdragon.com

As for snacks, it varies by season, but Nature Valley Granola Bars (crunchy) are what’s currently in the cupboard downstairs so that’s what I grab when I’m snacky. 

Stay safe and wear a mask, y’all.